The history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries.

The fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries. For centuries, poetry anthologies shaped the way that generations of British readers encountered literature. Eighteenth-century young women were introduced to the permissible bits of Shakespeare and Swift in censored collections. Working-class Victorians enrolled to be taught from The Golden Treasury at adult learning colleges. Pop-loving teenagers in the 1960s got their first taste of the counterculture from the bestselling The Mersey Sound. InThe Treasuries, Clare Bucknell reveals anthologies to be a unique window into social history. This is the story of some of the most widely read books ever published, and the cultural conversations – around politics, gender, class and nationhood – they sparked.

"The delight of this book is its expert toggling of scale. Bucknell dissects large issues - politics, class, taste, education - via small vignettes: Palgrave collecting his poems with scissors, war poems falling like bombs, poetry on prescription. Her panoramic history throws up unexpected parallels - the Exclusion Crisis and the Spanish Civil War, Keats and working men’s eduction, ballads and pop. Treasuries is smart and learned but unpatronising: it sparkles with appreciation for the anthologist and their always-partial act of selection." - author of Portable Magic